So by now our schedules are overflowing with All The Online Things -- leaving us to wonder what they did for fun during lengthy pre-internet quarantine periods, but I'm sure historians have weighed in on this elsewhere on the intertubes -- so, apart from the standard issue binge-watches and nightly opera streams, we'll highlight three items for this week:
The NTLive stream on YT (to sometime Thursday GMT) is A Streetcar Named Desire with Gillian Anderson, worth catching if you missed it in theaters and/or in the theatre;
Complicité's The Encounter, which originally streamed on The Space website when they were still doing that kind of thing, is up through tomorrow -- you will need headphones but the soundscape work is more than worth the price of admission;
and Folk On Foot's Front Room Festival 2 goes live tomorrow at 9am ET -- the first one was pretty excellent, went smoothly, and raised a bucket of cash for UK artist relief, and the lineup for the second round is just as stellar. Will likely be housed on YT for a time, if you're bound for other plans.
Showing posts with label NTLive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NTLive. Show all posts
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Thursday, April 18, 2019
The truth of what we are: Richard II @ NTLive
A few weeks ago we took advantage of a lull in the snow to take in the NT Live of Simon Russell Beale's Richard II, in a very stripped down and streamlined version from the Almeida Theatre directed by Joe Hill-Gibbons. RII is a wordy play with a big cast and a lot of complicated ground to cover, so clocking in at two hours is quite a feat of editing.
And edit they did. The play is stripped of props, costumes, a lot of its text, and doors. Three walls and a floor of riveted industrial steel plates contain every scene, with a luminescent ceiling that provides most of the lighting. Nobody leaves or enters -- nobody can leave or enter, which is pretty much the point -- and the whole cast (in street clothes except for a gold paperboard crown) is on stage at all times. Everyone but Richard and Bolingbroke shuffle roles. Saskia Reeves, who starts the play as Bushey, plays all her other roles smeared in the blood of her first character's execution. There is something poetic, if uncomfortable, in that, nor is anyone spared: buckets line the walls marked Water, Soil, and Blood, and over the course of the play, used for various purposes, their contents mire this scepter'd isle and her people in an inescapably vile slough of ambition, betrayal, and murder. Nowhere is this better brought home than in the comedic yet horrifying lightning-round of internecine accusation and gratuitous gage-casting that Bolingbroke (Leo Bill), newly-crowned, realizes he is completely powerless to stop. He looks very tired by then.
Given the lack of frills and extras, blocking and choreography count for a great deal. Much is accomplished by various clusterings of the secondary characters, whose function is often chorus-like and underscores the precarious nature of allegiance under duress. You can't always tell who any of them are or where they're placing their bets, but in the end of course it doesn't matter.
Simon Russell Beale gets to start the play with Richard's ending soliloquy, a device that frames history as theater and makes everything flashback until the speech comes around again toward the end of the play. Certain other changes are deftly managed, like the garden scene where normally the Queen would be in conversation with her ladies - the ladies' lines are given to Richard here. So it becomes a dialogue in which Richard's sense of self as king is briskly torn down as each frivolous pastime he offers, each remnant of his days of safety, is rejected in favor of some grim alternative in this new reality.
SRB made his name as an actor on his keen sense of detail in a line, and he is no dogmatic follower of inherited interpretation or straitjacketing adherence to meter. So, in any text you think you know well, he can make a chasm open up suddenly at your feet. Here, in the Westminster scene, it was when he's asked leave to go "Whither you will, so I were from your sights", and Bolingbroke says "Go some of you and convey him to the Tower." There's a moment's hesitation as Richard processes what that means, and we feel some of that sudden vertigo - that palmer's walking staff would never be an option.
And edit they did. The play is stripped of props, costumes, a lot of its text, and doors. Three walls and a floor of riveted industrial steel plates contain every scene, with a luminescent ceiling that provides most of the lighting. Nobody leaves or enters -- nobody can leave or enter, which is pretty much the point -- and the whole cast (in street clothes except for a gold paperboard crown) is on stage at all times. Everyone but Richard and Bolingbroke shuffle roles. Saskia Reeves, who starts the play as Bushey, plays all her other roles smeared in the blood of her first character's execution. There is something poetic, if uncomfortable, in that, nor is anyone spared: buckets line the walls marked Water, Soil, and Blood, and over the course of the play, used for various purposes, their contents mire this scepter'd isle and her people in an inescapably vile slough of ambition, betrayal, and murder. Nowhere is this better brought home than in the comedic yet horrifying lightning-round of internecine accusation and gratuitous gage-casting that Bolingbroke (Leo Bill), newly-crowned, realizes he is completely powerless to stop. He looks very tired by then.
Given the lack of frills and extras, blocking and choreography count for a great deal. Much is accomplished by various clusterings of the secondary characters, whose function is often chorus-like and underscores the precarious nature of allegiance under duress. You can't always tell who any of them are or where they're placing their bets, but in the end of course it doesn't matter.
Simon Russell Beale gets to start the play with Richard's ending soliloquy, a device that frames history as theater and makes everything flashback until the speech comes around again toward the end of the play. Certain other changes are deftly managed, like the garden scene where normally the Queen would be in conversation with her ladies - the ladies' lines are given to Richard here. So it becomes a dialogue in which Richard's sense of self as king is briskly torn down as each frivolous pastime he offers, each remnant of his days of safety, is rejected in favor of some grim alternative in this new reality.
SRB made his name as an actor on his keen sense of detail in a line, and he is no dogmatic follower of inherited interpretation or straitjacketing adherence to meter. So, in any text you think you know well, he can make a chasm open up suddenly at your feet. Here, in the Westminster scene, it was when he's asked leave to go "Whither you will, so I were from your sights", and Bolingbroke says "Go some of you and convey him to the Tower." There's a moment's hesitation as Richard processes what that means, and we feel some of that sudden vertigo - that palmer's walking staff would never be an option.
Monday, January 4, 2016
and a bit with a dog: Jane Eyre, NTLive encore
If you’re familiar with the novel, Bristol Old Vic’s stage adaptation of Jane Eyre, in its planed-down, single-night National Theatre version, is a fairly effective representation as representations go. Director Sally Cookson’s staging makes excellent use of minimal resources: a unit set with ramp, platform, and ladders; sundry props; a small cast who mostly rotate characters (all except Jane and Bertha); and a smaller band (piano, percussion, double bass, miscellaneous other things) that supplies a beautifully atmospheric soundscape for events to unfold against.
And it’s an impressive job, given that much of it emerged from the actors improvising on a framework of scenes, anchored by Charlotte Brontë’s written dialogue for key moments. So we get most of the really iconic exchanges intact, along with a few deft shortcuts. (We also get a few extras, among them Rochester, having been thrown from his horse, employing the language most of us would use nowadays under similar circumstances.)
Perhaps the most effective addition is an expanded role for Bertha Mason (Melanie Marshall, voice of gold), an almost continual presence in the form of a woman in a red dress, singing a vocal line that weaves in and out of the action, through trad song, popular song (an anachronistic but fitting Mad About the Boy), and elsewhere, as she drifts through the scenes of other people’s lives and occasionally lights a match. Because she is always there, and because of what she sings, it draws a heavier line of relationship between her and Jane than the book affords.
Also of note: Jane’s portable psychological chorus, which coalesces from the cast at Jane’s moments of uncertainty, agree or disagree with her and each other, and pay attention to things she can’t be seen to be paying attention to.
Also, evil Mr. Brocklehurst (Craig Edwards) reincarnating as Pilot the dog is a bit of inspired leveling-up.
Now for the quibbling. C’mon, you knew there would be some.
Madeleine Worrall’s Jane and Felix Hayes’s Rochester are good but ultimately a bit samey. Worrall in particular, whose character has the longest distance to travel both mentally and physically, plays a Jane who exists on a knife edge, the same at Gateshead and Lowood as at Thornfield, and it shows in her face all the time, like she’s ready to explode any second. But the character that Brontë wrote, by the time she gets to Thornfield, has mastered inscrutability, the end result of years of abuse and privation and endurance being a dense carapace of equanimity. It may be she’s ready to explode at any second, but we shouldn’t be able to tell, and neither, necessarily, should she.
Likewise Felix Hayes’s Rochester is all bluster, which makes him a bit predictable after a while, in a shouty monolithic kind of way. It’s the kind of Rochester that equates physically dangerous with interesting, when what should be interesting (and dangerous) about him is his unpredictability.
Not surprisingly, it’s the Moor House episode that suffers the most from cuts. For one thing, we lose a Rivers sister. The result of this is we get one sister, Diana (Simone Saunders, also Bessie and Blanche Ingram), devoid of background and thus existing only to be cardboard cheerleader to brother St John (Laura Elphinstone, also Helen Burns, Grace Poole, and Adele), rather than two sisters working in the governess trade, spending vacation back at the old homestead, and reading scurrilous German literature to each other when St Bro is not at home. (I know that few people on Planet Anglo get why this is funny, or the point Brontë was ostensibly trying to make with it, but it’s the undercurrent that keeps us out of the shallows, people.)
Beyond that, enough additional material is cut – what St John is giving up to go to India, for instance -- that we don’t really get much sense of why Jane would entertain St John’s proposal for more than a split nanosecond, or (disembodied voices notwithstanding) how the heat of those personal crises would propel her back to Thornfield.
Once she is back there, amid the broken wooden frames and with black ash falling all around, things get very thumbnail, to the point where I’m not sure anyone unfamiliar with the story would quite understand what had happened. But at the end of three and a half hours, it’s not necessarily a bad idea to finish things off with a few broad brush strokes, and they do it, ending where they began, with a certain calligraphic elegance.
And it’s an impressive job, given that much of it emerged from the actors improvising on a framework of scenes, anchored by Charlotte Brontë’s written dialogue for key moments. So we get most of the really iconic exchanges intact, along with a few deft shortcuts. (We also get a few extras, among them Rochester, having been thrown from his horse, employing the language most of us would use nowadays under similar circumstances.)
Perhaps the most effective addition is an expanded role for Bertha Mason (Melanie Marshall, voice of gold), an almost continual presence in the form of a woman in a red dress, singing a vocal line that weaves in and out of the action, through trad song, popular song (an anachronistic but fitting Mad About the Boy), and elsewhere, as she drifts through the scenes of other people’s lives and occasionally lights a match. Because she is always there, and because of what she sings, it draws a heavier line of relationship between her and Jane than the book affords.
Also of note: Jane’s portable psychological chorus, which coalesces from the cast at Jane’s moments of uncertainty, agree or disagree with her and each other, and pay attention to things she can’t be seen to be paying attention to.
Also, evil Mr. Brocklehurst (Craig Edwards) reincarnating as Pilot the dog is a bit of inspired leveling-up.
Now for the quibbling. C’mon, you knew there would be some.
Madeleine Worrall’s Jane and Felix Hayes’s Rochester are good but ultimately a bit samey. Worrall in particular, whose character has the longest distance to travel both mentally and physically, plays a Jane who exists on a knife edge, the same at Gateshead and Lowood as at Thornfield, and it shows in her face all the time, like she’s ready to explode any second. But the character that Brontë wrote, by the time she gets to Thornfield, has mastered inscrutability, the end result of years of abuse and privation and endurance being a dense carapace of equanimity. It may be she’s ready to explode at any second, but we shouldn’t be able to tell, and neither, necessarily, should she.
Likewise Felix Hayes’s Rochester is all bluster, which makes him a bit predictable after a while, in a shouty monolithic kind of way. It’s the kind of Rochester that equates physically dangerous with interesting, when what should be interesting (and dangerous) about him is his unpredictability.
Not surprisingly, it’s the Moor House episode that suffers the most from cuts. For one thing, we lose a Rivers sister. The result of this is we get one sister, Diana (Simone Saunders, also Bessie and Blanche Ingram), devoid of background and thus existing only to be cardboard cheerleader to brother St John (Laura Elphinstone, also Helen Burns, Grace Poole, and Adele), rather than two sisters working in the governess trade, spending vacation back at the old homestead, and reading scurrilous German literature to each other when St Bro is not at home. (I know that few people on Planet Anglo get why this is funny, or the point Brontë was ostensibly trying to make with it, but it’s the undercurrent that keeps us out of the shallows, people.)
Beyond that, enough additional material is cut – what St John is giving up to go to India, for instance -- that we don’t really get much sense of why Jane would entertain St John’s proposal for more than a split nanosecond, or (disembodied voices notwithstanding) how the heat of those personal crises would propel her back to Thornfield.
Once she is back there, amid the broken wooden frames and with black ash falling all around, things get very thumbnail, to the point where I’m not sure anyone unfamiliar with the story would quite understand what had happened. But at the end of three and a half hours, it’s not necessarily a bad idea to finish things off with a few broad brush strokes, and they do it, ending where they began, with a certain calligraphic elegance.
Friday, May 31, 2013
seize the stage
So, for reasons too blah blah woof woof to expound upon, people keep asking me if I'm moving to the Left Coast, and I keep having to tell them "Hell no, I got tickets to stuff." A reasonable response when:
Olympia Dukakis gets her Thirty Years War on, July through August, in Shakespeare & Co's production of Mother Courage, and
Donmar Warehouse in London sends its all-women Julius Caesar to St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn in October, and
The Testament of Mary may have suffered an abrupt decanonization at the hands of Broadway (despite having the best print ad ever), but Fiona Shaw buttonholes the wedding guests for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner at BAM in December as part of its 2013 Next Wave Festival.
Meanwhile, in the Wonders of Technology vein, NTLive has Helen Mirren reprising HMQ in The Audience some time in the next month (depending on where you are), and they've added Kenneth Branagh's Macbeth to the schedule for sometime in July (likewise check local). I find Branagh's Shakespeare tends to shrugworthy, but Alex Kingston's Lady M could be fun.
Also coming down the pike: September it's Othello with Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear, directed by Nicholas Hytner; and in January 2014 Coriolanus browbeats the fickle masses in a production directed by Josie Rourke, with Tom Hiddleston and Mark Gatiss, from the aforementioned Donmar Warehouse.
Finally, the RSC gets in on the game sometime in November with David Tennant's Richard II. Are you sensing a theme?
Olympia Dukakis gets her Thirty Years War on, July through August, in Shakespeare & Co's production of Mother Courage, and
Donmar Warehouse in London sends its all-women Julius Caesar to St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn in October, and
The Testament of Mary may have suffered an abrupt decanonization at the hands of Broadway (despite having the best print ad ever), but Fiona Shaw buttonholes the wedding guests for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner at BAM in December as part of its 2013 Next Wave Festival.
Meanwhile, in the Wonders of Technology vein, NTLive has Helen Mirren reprising HMQ in The Audience some time in the next month (depending on where you are), and they've added Kenneth Branagh's Macbeth to the schedule for sometime in July (likewise check local). I find Branagh's Shakespeare tends to shrugworthy, but Alex Kingston's Lady M could be fun.
Also coming down the pike: September it's Othello with Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear, directed by Nicholas Hytner; and in January 2014 Coriolanus browbeats the fickle masses in a production directed by Josie Rourke, with Tom Hiddleston and Mark Gatiss, from the aforementioned Donmar Warehouse.
Finally, the RSC gets in on the game sometime in November with David Tennant's Richard II. Are you sensing a theme?
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
sundry items
Arte Live Web has Britten's War Requiem from Coventry Cathedral, with Erin Wall, Mark Padmore, and Hanno Müller-Brachmann. (If the video at the above link doesn't work, try it from the menu on the Klassik page.)
The first of Glyndebourne's summer webcasts, The Cunning Little Vixen, is up until June 22 at Glyndebourne's website and also at The Guardian.
An intriguingly questionable project, this Elizabethan Nick Drake tribute album, but it's an interesting argument (in the Shakespearean sense) and it can't possibly be as horrific as Sting's Dowland album.
The Department of Demographics reports that last night's encore performance of Frankenstein, via NTLive, showed an audience transmuted from predominantly middle-aged theater geeks to twenty-something Benedict Cumberbatch fangirls. To their credit, there was minimal squeeing. Will they show up again for Simon Russell Beale's Timon of Athens? Watch this space.
Must be a global warming thing, but Tempests are cropping up all over. Between The Enchanted Island and the next Robert Lepage multi-media fling, US hdcasting hubs have Christopher Plummer's Prospero from Stratford Festival this Thursday. Olympia Dukakis brings the rough magic to Lenox, Massachusetts in July. There's a Night Waves chatfest on the play from last month archived here. The radio play to go with that has timed out, however. If this is a matter of lamentation for thee, do thou direct thy plaint unto the Ministrie of Noyse.
The first of Glyndebourne's summer webcasts, The Cunning Little Vixen, is up until June 22 at Glyndebourne's website and also at The Guardian.
An intriguingly questionable project, this Elizabethan Nick Drake tribute album, but it's an interesting argument (in the Shakespearean sense) and it can't possibly be as horrific as Sting's Dowland album.
The Department of Demographics reports that last night's encore performance of Frankenstein, via NTLive, showed an audience transmuted from predominantly middle-aged theater geeks to twenty-something Benedict Cumberbatch fangirls. To their credit, there was minimal squeeing. Will they show up again for Simon Russell Beale's Timon of Athens? Watch this space.
Must be a global warming thing, but Tempests are cropping up all over. Between The Enchanted Island and the next Robert Lepage multi-media fling, US hdcasting hubs have Christopher Plummer's Prospero from Stratford Festival this Thursday. Olympia Dukakis brings the rough magic to Lenox, Massachusetts in July. There's a Night Waves chatfest on the play from last month archived here. The radio play to go with that has timed out, however. If this is a matter of lamentation for thee, do thou direct thy plaint unto the Ministrie of Noyse.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
the bloody office of his timeless end
But first, John Simon reviews a new book on Verdi and Shakespeare. Could be good.
And speaking of the latter (or not, if you prefer), as foretold, grim visag'd war comes to Brooklyn in January, and is coming to stay for a couple of months. If one's exchequer weren't quite so...what it is, one could catch the beginning,* then the end, and skip all that business with France in the middle.
Meanwhile Collaborators is out and about in the coming weeks via NTLive. Simon Russell Beale: could have been the next Bond villain but Sam Mendes couldn't scope the Cute and Deadly. So have him as Stalin instead. That'll do. Check your local, as dates and times tend to vary this side of the water.
*and behold the absence of moss gathered
And speaking of the latter (or not, if you prefer), as foretold, grim visag'd war comes to Brooklyn in January, and is coming to stay for a couple of months. If one's exchequer weren't quite so...what it is, one could catch the beginning,* then the end, and skip all that business with France in the middle.
Meanwhile Collaborators is out and about in the coming weeks via NTLive. Simon Russell Beale: could have been the next Bond villain but Sam Mendes couldn't scope the Cute and Deadly. So have him as Stalin instead. That'll do. Check your local, as dates and times tend to vary this side of the water.
*and behold the absence of moss gathered
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